1st Edition
Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference Living Life as Fiction
By Stephen E. Kidd
Copyright 2025
206 Pages
by
Routledge
206 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Lucian’s writings raise questions about the nature of reading and viewing the lives of others; this book explores these questions through close readings of Lucian’s dialogues and stories.
Lucian scholarship over the past decades has been dominated by terms like performance and personas, so this book asks simply: what happens when we are not performing? When we read or sit in the audience, we... Read more
Introduction; 1. Hermotimus and the Problem of the Sceptic Self; 2. Life as Theater: Charon, Icaromenippus and Not Being There; 3. Nigrinus on Not Being There Together; 4. Viewing Lives in Rooster; 5. Reading and Believing: The Challenge of Lucian’s True Stories; 6. Preconceptions and what Readers Cannot Control; 7. Character, Emotion, and Trust in Lucian’s Panthea Dialogues; Conclusions.
Biography
Stephen E. Kidd is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University (U.S.A), where he specializes in ancient Greek literature of the classical and imperial periods. He is the author of Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy (2014) and Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece (2019).
